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Perfect10 filed a complaint with the US Federal District Court at Southern District of California against Megaupload Limited and Kim Schmitz for allegedly introducing services that promote infringement on a large scale and due to which Perfect10 along with many other companies are facing trouble operating their business smoothly.
Perfect10 is a California based corporation which is engaged in design, creation, production, marketing, promotion and sale of copyrighted adult entertainment products including photographs, magazines, video productions, cell phone downloads and other media. It has been operating a magazine named “Perfect10” and a website www.perfect10.com. The corporation was forced to shut down its magazine business due to the infringement related activities. It has been possession of trademarks in the name of “Perfect 10”,”Perfect10.com” and “P10”.
On the other hand Megaupload Limited is in the business of operating websites in the name of megaupload.com, megaporn.com, megaortic.com, megavideo.com and megaclick.com and which are accessible throughout the world including United States. Megaupload offers its membership at a cost of 9.99 euros per months and under this contract a member can download as much number of files from the megaupload server as he can. It provides services in which a member can upload a file on the megaupload server and upon completion they are given a unique URL for the file that was uploaded. This unique URL can be shared to megaupload members and they could freely download the files behind the said link.
It is worth mentioning here that megaupload also promotes campaigns for downloading the files from its server. Under one such campaign it pays $10,000 to a member whose files have been downloaded for 500,000 times from the megaupload server. In this way it is promoting mass downloading of the files that are interesting.
Perfect 10’s attorney, Eric J. Benink, alleges in the complaint that due to the infringing policies of megaupload and its promotion business thereto, many of the members of megaupload are engaged in pirating copyrighted contents illegally and without paying the copyright owner a single penny. Perfect 10 is one of the corporations whose copyrighted digital files are continuously being infringed through this platform and which is creating a huge deficit in the treasury of the corporation.
Benink has proposed as many as six claims against megaupload amounting to copyright infringement, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, violation of 15 U.S.C., unfair competition and violation of rights of publicity.
Compensation worth $25 million has been sought by the complainant, Perfect 10, against megaupload as well as a trial by jury has also been sought against it.
Related documents : Southern District of California / 3:11-cv-00191 Docket Complaint
Tags : Perfect10, megaupload, copyright infringement, trademark infringement, unfair competition, perfect10.com, megaupload.com
By : Rahul Baiswar
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